NB Power's reliability ranking suffers as new outage record set
Customers have gone a combined 17 million hours without power in 2014
Customers of NB Power who have been complaining the utility is not as reliable as it used to be haven't been exaggerating — it isn't.
"Twenty years ago, NB Power had a sterling reputation," says Fredericton resident Mike Gange, who lost his power twice for extended periods in the last five months.
"Today, I think the perception is that is it rusty and dusty."
NB Power is within days of completing its worst year ever for power outages.
Its customers have gone a combined 17 million hours without electricity so far in 2014, more than double its previous record — which it set last year.
But NB Power’s own numbers show it has been sinking in national and regional reliability rankings in one key category for a number of years, the length of time customers spend in the dark.
"When it comes to a major storm, we are almost guaranteed that we are going to lose our power," said Ashley Nickerson, who lives in the rural community of Halcomb outside Miramichi.
Nickerson said she has lost power at least twice in the last year and has come to expect the worst when the weather forecast looks grim.
"As far as reliability during a storm or a major situation, I don't find them [NB Power] reliable at all."
Until recently, NB Power had long been a regional leader in the reliability of its service.
1994-1999 | 27.4 |
2000-2004 | 29.2 |
2005-2009 | 30.3 |
2010-2014 | 90.6 |
Source: NB Power |
In the 15 years spanning 1994 to 2009, its customers lost power for an average of less than six hours each per year.
That number jumped to more than eight hours in 2010 and then to more than nine hours in 2011, at the time that was the worst year for customers left in the dark since the legendary ice storm of 1998.
But then last year, NB Power customers endured 7 million hours of outages — 21 hours per customer — with that number more than doubling this year.
Electricity has been cut off to more than 50,000 customers six different times since the start of 2013.
Even Nova Scotia Power, which NB Power dominated in reliability rankings through the 1990s and 2000s, will post shorter customer outage numbers this year, for the fourth year in a row.
"In the last year, as a result of the ice storm and the result of Arthur, there are certainly a portion of our customers that are very, very sensitive to outages," said O’Hara said.
"You know today they would be looking for us to do things that would help to improve that situation."
NB Power has doubled its budget for cutting trees along its power lines to try and prevent future outages and fix its declining reliability numbers, something Nova Scotia Power did in 2009.
Still, O'Hara said that doesn't mean NB Power's failure to spend more in the past was a mistake.
"At that time the performance of the system was quite satisfactory," said O'Hara.
"So the amounts that were spent at that time were appropriate for the time."